Thursday, August 25, 2005

Ubiquitous Technology and Inverted Surveillance

A few days ago there was an interesting little event in the states. The incident at the centre of the discussion is a concert in Utah which was raided by the police. Here is the article in a local Utah newspaper about the event.

Presents one perspective, yes?

Check this out, in particular the downloadable video of what happened at the event.

More and more photos are trickling into various online sources about the event along with more video files which call the official perspective into question. I'm not sure that the video file from the second site I've linked to is from a phone or anything like that, but it's certainly part of the same process.

I think that it's likely that events fit somewhere between the two accounts, but without the increasing ubiquity of recording devices we'd only have had the authority's version reported with any evidence to back it up.

4 Comments:

I was thinking about posting a blog on this too because it reminded me of that case of the pakistani boy who recorded some police arresting him which resulted in the charges being dropped, and in this case you can see the american armed forces using undue force on the partygoers. Here is a link to a first hand account of the event:

"... but without the increasing ubiquity of recording devices we'd only have had the authority's version reported with any evidence to back it up." Reminds me of the second lecture when Luke told us about the story of a young man, who was arrested and was being assalted (or was it verbally assaulted) in the police car and that the guy managed to record what the police was saying through the recording button on his cell phone, and that it was played back in court and all previous charges towards the young guy was dropped (thanks to the technological evidence.) The mobile phone with recording function is a "life saver", it is easy, non-suspicious and fast for evidence saved. I remember one episode from "Shortland Street", when Ivy's sister was having a conversation with a business man that knows Dominic, how he confirmed that Dominc was blackmailing him and all confessions was secretly recorded onto Ivy's cell phone.

The cell is a must and is a need to be carried around wherever you go, and I mean wherever you go, why? because one unfortunate story I've heard from a friend is that one time when she went back to the lecture theatre at the clock tower to get her jumper the lights and security doors had just closed off and she was unable to get out. (The uni has a certain time in the system that doors get locked on the time set). But luckily she had her cell phone with her (when she went back she wasn't going to carry her bag and books with her because she thought that it would be a quick thing to do) and managed to call the uni or the security people to come and unlock the door for her. So that comes to show that wherever you are and whereever you go it is very handy to still carry your cell phone with you, you just never know what could happen.